The Editors's blog

For a variety of reasons, we have been very hands-off when it comes to the comment section at The Next Right. We do not wish to turn this blog into a comfortable echo chamber. However, it is one thing to operate a big tent and tolerate dissent, but it is quite another thing to allow some behavior to poison the environment for others.

We've heard from a lot of people that the comment section at The Next Right just doesn't have a good signal/noise ratio. There is just too much trolling, thread hijacking, and behavior that simply does not create a productive interesting conversation. We don't object to disagreement - from the left or right - but we want The Next Right to be a more valuable, enjoyable experience for our thoughtful commenters and for the people who would participate if the signal/noise ratio was higher. And, frankly, for us, too.

So, here's the deal: We are not making formal rules. We simply expect commenters to be reasonable, generally substantive part of a functional community. If we believe commenters are detracting from the community, we will block them from commenting. We will not do this lightly, over policy disagreement, or on the basis of political orientation.

Our goal is not to purge dissent.   We do not seek to create a "safe haven" from people who disagree with us.  Indeed, part of the purpose of The Next Right is to confront some of these conflicts.  Our goal is simply to improve the value of that conversation.

One of the things that we hope to address at The Next Right is how to integrate all the excitement from the grassroots organizations from the Presidential primary. Last week, the energy behind Mike Huckabee's campaign in South Carolina resulted in Glenn McCall's election as South Carolina Republican National Commtiteeman.

Tomorrow, the editors of The Next Right will be casting our three votes for Amit Singh in the Republican Primary in VA-08. The grassroots energy behind Singh is a combination of Ron Paul supporters and NoVA Indian-Americans.

Our endorsement of Singh focuses on several issues:

• He has a real grassroots core.
• He is dedicated to small government. This is beyond question in a Ron Paul supporter.
• His position on the Iraq war is reasonably solid. More on this below.
• While we don't think that he would be likely to win a general against Jim Moran, clearly an embarassment to Congress and Northern Virginia, we believe that he can attract activists and support for the whole GOP ticket.
• Mark Ellmore's campaign has demonstrated a desperate dishonesty in the last couple of days that we find quite disturbing.

Read on after the jump.